Recently I promised my wife to make her a portfolio of her painting work (part of which you can see here).
Boy was I sweating over my Canon pro 9000. Tried all profiles and color management settings but finally gave up the ghost: Now I'm using color management by the printer driver to get at least a littler closer to a true reproduction of the colors.
The real problem with reproducing paintings is that you have the original to compare to the print. Which is never possible when you're shooting real life scenes. And forget about the monitor: You can never match the colors on the monitor which is self-luminous to the colors on the canvas which are reflecting the ambient light and are changing with them

Never thought it was so hard to get close to the original colors and I'm still fighting with the yellows which normally turn out to be too orange and have too little green even if the reds, blues and greens look ok.
And yes I had a neutral white paper shot together with the paintings to get the white-balance but the results were not good enough. Perhaps I need to put the photo paper I print on (Canon GP-501 general purpose glossy paper) in the photo to match the WB.

I was doing all work from Lightroom 2.

Does anybody have any tricks or experiences with reproducing paintings?
Let me/us know!

Nope, I think I'm not going the calibration way.
I finally found a combination of setup parameters that allow me to come pretty close to the intended target.
What holds me back is that even with a fixed set of adjustments sometimes they are perfect and in other cases I need some other tweaks. So I doubt that one calibration can be optimal for all types of images.
But then, maybe, I'm wrong. Perhaps anybody with print calibration can allude to that...